Sunday, 15 March 2015

Remnants of SA nuclear weapons programme worry the USA

The Washington Post has written about a long stalemate between US and SA officials as the prior try to convince the latter to surrender SA's stockpile of highly-enriched uranium (HEU): US unease about SA highly enriched uranium stockpile. DWG tells the tale of the acquisition and eventual dismantling of nukes by the apartheid regime, though certain "dual-use" elements, like the HEU stockpile - sufficient to build six Hiroshima-yield nukes - remain under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision and have been used to produce medical isotopes - a huge foreign-exchange earner for SA. The US is concerned about the HEU stockpile's security after a narrowly-foiled robbery at Pelindaba in 2007. I had argued in DWG that dual-use electronic relays and detonators were inadequately supervised and in 1998 - five years after the nuke programme was declared dead by FW de Klerk - caused a premature detonation east of Pretoria that killed four workers.

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About Me

Michael Schmidt is an African field reporter with 28 years of experience, and a reputation for producing unique and challenging copy, having worked for 19 years on some of South Africa's leading print titles including The Mercury and Sunday Times. He was involved as a senior journalist with the start-ups of ThisDay, and of what is now Independent on Saturday. He was group special investigative writer for Independent Newspapers' seven weekend titles before going into journalism training. He has five books published and is developing six more books and four multimedia projects. He was a 2009 Academic Leader at Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), a 2011 Media Fellow at Duke University (USA), and a 2017 Fellow at the Arts Rights Justice Academy (Germany). He continues to write for both the mainstream and alternative media. He is:
* former Executive Director, Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (IAJ)
* Administrative Secretary, Professional Journalists Association of South Africa (ProJourn)
* Convenor, Southern African Cities of Refuge Project
* Co-Creative Director, Not Night, but An Absence of Stars